The Invisible Man: Taking Gaslighting to the Extreme

Article by Valentina Castro (undergraduate FIGRI student), with additional style corrections by Laura López (undergraduate Journalism student)

This article includes spoilers for the 2020 film The Invisible Man.

The origin of the term gaslighting comes from a 1933 play called Gaslight in which the protagonist is constantly manipulated by her husband into believing that she is going mad. This is recurrent behaviour in abusive relationships in which the abuser may even convince you that you have imagined or exaggerated the abuse he has inflicted on you. The Invisible Man, an adaptation that portrays the problematic situation of these times, shows us Cecilia, magnificently interpreted by Elizabeth Moss, and her abusive relationship with a multimillionaire expert in the field of optics, who harasses and assaults her even after his apparent suicide.

The plot is as follows: Cecilia barely manages to escape from the house in which she was confined by her partner, after which her best friend gives her refuge. Two weeks later, her sister tells her that she can now stop worrying for her safety as her husband had committed suicide. However, it doesn't take long before she begins to feel that someone is watching her, and she decides to tell both her sister and her best friend that her husband is still around. She believes that he has managed to stay unseen and that knows that he, as an expert in optics, is capable of doing something like that. Nobody believes her, and after Cecilia’s sister is attacked in a public place, she is framed for it. Cecilia is labelled as crazy and put in a mental institution. There, her brother-in-law tells her that all her problems can come to an end if she accepts that she’ll have the baby and return to her husband: the man who got her pregnant without her consent.

It feels like this adaptation was necessary because it shows how far the abuse suffered by a woman can extend in a romantic relationship and also because it responds to a current reality in which we have movements like #MeToo and the worldwide performances of A Rapist In Your Path. It is thanks to these that many women have found the courage to talk about the abusive situations they have been subjected to out loud, and feel the empathy and support of many other women who have gone through a similar thing.

The Invisible Man shows gaslighting taken to the extreme. It shows us a man who is able and willing to become invisible and fake his own death just to torment the woman who dared to run away from him and his aggressions. But not only that; it also shows us the reaction of all the people around her, who not for one moment stopped to reason what she was saying to them, even though she was the one who knew him the most and therefore knew how far he was capable of going. They put her into an institution even before asking what she thought was happening. Which also reminds us of those times when women were diagnosed with female hysteria for expressing strong emotions and therefore received the “treatment” of sexual stimulation because this hysteria was believed to be characteristic of repressed sexual desire. Does this argument of lack of sex sound familiar? This way of thinking goes back a long way and has managed to survive until today.

It is undeniable that many of us have gone through this type of situation, in which we are not only victims of the gaslighting that comes from those who abuse us, but from the people we turn to for support. They call us exaggerated, weak, and hysterical. Many of us have felt the despair of feeling that asking for help is as ineffective as shouting under water, as speaking to a deaf person. But it hurts much more, because we know that the people we are turning to are not deaf, nor under water. We feel invalidated and irrelevant, as if our testimonies, our positions, and our struggles are not in fact the result of structural problems and systematic behaviour.

This situation, which is historical in nature, is what makes the networks that are woven between women so valuable and fundamental to a democratic society. They are alliances that are formed to survive the asphyxiation of male violence against us. We invented safe spaces back in the 80's and that is when the most important theorists of feminism discovered that these feelings were not the result of individual experiences but of individualized ones, which is an important distinction. Therefore, it is important to talk, to communicate, and to be taken seriously. Only in this way can we see the root of the problem, of our oppression.